Gary Willoughby

Artist Statement

In my series of paintings entitled Irony I used custom made wood lattice. I often use fragmented imagery, whereby the painting is given depth as opposed to a flat surface. My artistic background has been with sculpture and textured surfaces, which I began to explore in the 1970’s while in graduate school, working with non-traditional materials. I painted on cast latex rubber, fiberglass and distressed canvas which in time evolved into wooden panels.

The Irony series is based on concepts from my love of vintage and antique film posters and advertisements. My use of custom made structures to paint on was intentional in pushing my work toward mimicking old world advertising as would have appeared on billboards and on the side of barns where I grew up in the midwest. They are representative of ripping those advertisements off an unknown building or wooden fence.

In my work the past and present are always connected. I have chosen to use the clown image representing a court jester, or a Judas pitchman which ties into the absurdity of past thought. They are reminiscent of carnival barkers, the snake oil salesmen of their time. I have taken beliefs and perspectives of yesteryear and skewed the concepts through the lens of the absurdity of unscientific thought and the concepts of vanity and enhanced beauty.

In my most current series of work the Clue paintings, I continue to draw from the days of advertising on billboards and into the colorful men’s magazines of that time, focusing on popular Detective magazines. These publications were prevalent and popular during the late 1920’s -1930’s. Between the world wars and during the Great Depression there was a societal need and desire for escape found through the local cinema and magazines, with content generally based on adventure or romance. The men’s magazines focused on promising adventure in various forms being sold on news stands along side the daily newspapers.

I then began a new series of work which focused on the concept of the detective magazines. This body of work became a collage of painting and objects inside a custom made shadow box format. The found objects, many of them vintage could be construed as related clues to the story inside the magazine represented on canvas.

Post the Clue series I began to combine the clown imagery and the detective concepts and went back to traditional painting on canvas. These paintings represent once again the irony of the subject matter.